On the 24th and the 25th of April, the Pennsylvania chapter of the Palatines to America held their spring conference with Dr. Alfred Hans Kuby as the featured speaker. Dr. Kuby lives in Edenkoben, in the Palatinate. He is known as a minister, historian, and genealogist. In one talk, he gave glimpses of life in Edenkoben during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Around 1670, Edenkoben had 500 inhabitants. As a result of the Thirty Years' War the population had been greatly reduced from earlier numbers and it was many decades before the population was rebuilt. One way in which the population was rebuilt was by emigration from other Germanic regions.
Dr. Kuby documents that between 1653, shortly after the end of the war, and 1699, there was a total of 50 families who came from Switzerland to Edenkoben. (One of these families has a Germanna name, Amberger, but I would not claim there was any relationship to the Germanna family.)
In 1715, three families came from French regions, one family came from Flemish regions, one from Italy, and one from another German region. There was therefore a wide diversity of people living in Edenkoben.
In the next year, the pattern was similar. Perhaps there is a connection to the large number who emigrated from German regions in 1717, as these movements of people may have indicated very unsettled conditions.
The ruler of the Palatinate was Catholic and that was the favored religion. If one wanted to hold a public office, one must be a Catholic; however, a majority of the people were Reformed and a smaller number were Lutheran. There were difficulties for the Protestants but the climate was not oppressive. The Protestants had to observe the Catholic holy days. They could not do any work on these days, not even washing clothes at home. If they were caught, they were fined, with the fine going to the Catholic Church.
We now know that many of our Germanna people have origins outside the region from whence they migrated to America. For example, Christopher Zimmerman's ancestors came from the Canton of Bern in Switzerland. As you climb the Willheit tree, you find Swiss origins for some of the people. Many of the Germanna families had ancestors who had migrated into Germanic regions from other places. The Blankenbakers, for example, started on a path that originated in Austria and stopped first in Bavaria before moving west, close to the Rhine River, on lands of the Bishops of Speyer (now Baden). The Harnsbergers appear to have emigrated directly from Switzerland to Virginia but one cannot be sure that they did not do this is a two-stage move. They may have moved to a "German" region but left almost immediately for the New World.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.